Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,120

your deepest thoughts here in this journal, my love, and know that I will always be with you, forever and ever. Mom

I could barely tear my eyes away from the words to look back at Saundra. “Oh my God, Saundra!” I said. “This could tell us so much.” I opened the book at random. The pages felt crinkly and brittle, and they were covered with a rounded vertical script—a miniature example of the distinctive vertical loops so evident in Anna’s signature on the mural. “This is so cool!” I looked up at Saundra again. “I spend half my day wondering what was going through Anna’s mind while she painted this thing.” I nodded toward the mural. “Maybe this will tell me.”

“Why on earth my mother would have it, I don’t know,” Saundra said.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I agreed. “Mama Nelle would have been a little girl when Anna painted the mural, right? Nineteen-forty?”

“Right.” Saundra nodded. “But however it came to be in her hands, I’m just happy you want it, and that Mama was able to let me know I should give it to you.”

“Me, too.” I hugged the journal to my chest. I felt ridiculously happy, holding something that had spent so much time in Anna’s hands.

“Would you like to see the sketches?” Saundra asked.

“Yes, sure,” I said, although I was answering more to be polite than anything else. What I really wanted was to dig into the diary. The journal.

Saundra pulled a sheaf of sketch paper from the box and began spreading the portraits out on the table. There were six of them and the subjects all looked like African Americans.

“I’m pretty sure this one was my mother when she was a little girl,” Saundra said, pointing to one of the drawings. “It looks like a photograph I have of her. And this one might be my aunt Dodie, Mama and Uncle Jesse’s older sister. I can make some educated guesses as to the others, but I really don’t know for sure.”

“These really don’t look like Jesse Williams’s work,” I said, frowning at the sketches. “I’ll have to show them to Oliver—the curator—and see what he thinks.”

Saundra pulled out her phone to check the time. “Well,” she said, slipping her purse over her shoulder, “do what you want with them. They have to be from when he was a kid, given the age of my mother in the drawing, so probably not as polished an artist as he was later. And I’ve got to run.” She nodded toward the journal I still held against my chest like a treasure. “You be sure to tell me what you learn, all right?”

Chapter 58

ANNA

Wednesday, May 22, 1940

I’m pregnant with Martin Drapple’s child.

Those words make my skin crawl.

I haven’t written anything here in so long because … I don’t know. I guess because I didn’t want to see the truth in writing. I’ve been sick, but it seems the sicker I’ve felt physically, the stronger I’ve felt mentally, and the sickness is finally waning. I’m thinking clearly these days. I paint constantly and well. The mural is once again my friend.

Jesse doesn’t agree. He tells me I’m still not myself. “You ain’t a right-thinkin’ woman, Anna,” he says. He bases this on the fact that I have left the motorcycle and the skeleton head and the hammer and a few other odds and ends in the painting. I’ve come to see beauty in them, which worries him and sometimes makes me think he’s right. I don’t think I’m crazy, but I have changed. Of course I have. Martin no longer haunts me in the warehouse, turning out the lights, turning them on again. No, Martin now haunts me from inside. His spirit grows in my belly and I can’t get away from it. There is no question which haunting is worse.

Miss Myrtle asked the doctor to come see me again, but I refused to let him into my room. Miss Myrtle commented on how little I eat. “Yet you seem to be putting on weight,” she said. Oh, she must know, but how? I certainly am not yet showing. Has she heard me getting sick in the early mornings? Does she think I’m carrying Jesse’s child? If she thinks I’m expecting, who else could she possibly imagine to be the father? And what exactly am I going to do? I will be able to camouflage my growing belly with my smock when I’m in the warehouse, but out in the world it